It’s absurd that even at places like Google, which has effectively infinite money, there’s still this present attitude of not being able to afford paying workers. Nuts.
I think what’s particularly fascinating is not the relentless drive for more profits, that’s been hashed to death and I have nothing original to offer here, but how the internal narrative of “we can’t afford to pay them” holds in cases where it’s transparent bullshit. Of course Google can afford to pay its temp workers a fair wage, and of course they don’t want to. It’s just surprising that the story they tell themselves is so trivially falsifiable.
> the company just set an all-time record revenue of $61.9 billion this quarter, and record profits for the fourth quarter in a row at $18.5 billion.
From https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/27/22596592/google-q2-2021-r...
Regardless, the fear of marginally reducing profits drives companies to do a bunch of things that are fundamentally pretty gross.
It's understandable that a company, crunched for cash, ends up in odd situations.
It's not acceptable when you're sitting on mountains of cash - and - claim to have some kind of moral situation in commerce.
Google is exploitative because they don't fully compensate the value of labour used in production. This is wrong and damnable and illegal in any reasonable jurisdiction. Google is profitable. This is not wrong and commendable in most places. The concepts should not be conflated.
unfortunately, ceteris paribus, the tendency of a rate of profit to ultimately slow is one of the costs of a free market, there is not really a way out of it long term!
I generally use this phrase in the context of companies being willing to do anything to get back to being wildly profitable. And in that case, yes, there is quite a bit of danger towards basically everyone else.
It's not that these sages didn't understand. They refused. They actively rejected understanding.
Our epistemological crisis, where we don't even have a shared reality, has ancient roots.